And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book o...f life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that... supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Democracy and Republicanism in their best partisan utterances alike declare for human rights. Jefferson, the father of Democracy, ...Lincoln, the embodiment of Republicanism, and the Divine author of the religion on which true civilization rests, all proclaim the equal rights of all men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity; Romance means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery a...nd fantasy. A general distinction of this kind, whatever names may be used to render it, can be shown, in medieval literature, to hold good of the two large groups of narrative belonging to the earlier and the later Middle Ages respectively. Beowulf might stand for the one side. Lancelot or Gawain for the other. It is a difference not confined to literature. The two groups are distinguished from one another, as the respectable piratical gentleman of the North Sea coast in the ninth or tenth century differs from one of the companions of Saint Louis. The latter has something fantastic in his ideas which the other has not. The Crusader may indeed be natural and brutal enough in most of his ways, but he has lost the sobriety and simplicity of the earlier type of rover.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

By hero, we tend to mean a heightened man who, more than other men, possesses qualities of courage, loyalty, resourcefulness, char...isma, above all, selflessness. He is an example of right behavior; the sort of man who risks his life to protect his society's values, sacrificing his personal needs for those of the community. Virgil's Aeneas is a hero in this sense of the word. He devotes his warrior skills, his pleasures, and finally his life to the historical destiny of founding Rome. Dante climbing to heaven in the Divine Comedy is a hero. Sergeant York risking his life to "end all wars" is a hero.... There is, of course, another sort of heightened man who bulks large in the popular imagination.... He is not "loyal," not a model of right behavior. Quite the contrary, he fascinates because he undermines the expected order. He possesses the qualities of the "hero": skill, resourcefulness, courage, intelligence. But he is the opposite of selfless. He is hungry; "heightened," not as an example, but as a presence, a phenomenon of sheer energy. One thinks of certain sports heroes, who boast and indulge their whims; who cannot be relied on, not because they are treacherous, but because the order of their needs is purely idiosyncratic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »